Possible path to de-polarize our sharply divided nation

The latest issue of New York magazine features a long, bizarre, amazing story by Kera Bolonik about a hapless Harvard Law professor, Bruce Hay, who managed to get duped by two apparent grifters, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mischa Haider, one a lesbian and one a transgender woman, into believing that he had fathered a child with Shuman — a con that they allegedly ran on multiple men at once.

From this paternity-trap beginning, Hay found himself emotionally entangled, ideologically bullied and effectively extorted.

When this story dropped into the internet, the second-most-interesting thing, after the wild tale itself, was to watch how it was read by people who lean right versus people who lean left. The leftward-leaners were more likely to focus on Hay as a uniquely gullible or lust-addled individual and to draw strictly personal lessons from his disastrous arc.

The rightward-leaners, on the other hand, read the story politically, as a vivid allegory for the relationship between the old liberalism and the new — between a well-meaning liberal establishment that’s desperate to act enlightened and a woke progressivism that ruthlessly exploits the establishment’s ideological subservience. (“Not only did [Hay] trust Shuman,” Bolonik writes, but “he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she’d had sex with other men.”)

Since I am a right-leaner you can easily imagine to which reading I was instinctively inclined. But step back a bit, and the contrasting responses to this one bonkers story offer a way to think about our political polarization.

By this I mean the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative but about whether that story is somehow representative — or whether it’s just one tale among many in our teeming society and doesn’t stand for anything larger than itself.

When conservatives talk about liberal media bias, for instance, their complaint isn’t necessarily that mainstream outlets fail to report stories that might confirm a conservative worldview. Rather, it’s that they report on them in ways that make them sound dry and dull or just random and unrepresentative, without ever acknowledging their wider interest or significance.

Likewise, when liberals damn conservative megaphones for reporting “alternative facts” instead of real ones, what they often really mean is that the right-wing media reports on real facts and real stories — crimes committed by illegal immigrants, say, or the violent edge to the Antifa protests — but then overstates or misreads their significance.

All this suggests that breaking out of polarization, thinking for yourself instead of as a partisan, is ultimately more about imagination than information.

If I were trying to de-polarize someone, I might hand them a copy of their favorite magazine or newspaper and ask them to construct a version in which the exact same set of stories were edited and headlined and prioritized by an editor from the opposite political persuasion.

It’s not that full de-polarization is ever possible; basic moral and philosophical commitments inevitably divide us. But seeing our disagreements through the lens of narrative might get us closer to a crucial insight — which is that in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once.